Living the Pyrocene

I just finished reading Stephen J. Pyne’s book The Pyrocene: How we created an age of fire, and what happens next (UC Press, 2021). Pyne is a retired historian who worked at Arizona State University, and has spent his life studying fire across several continents. Pyne’s title is a spin-off of the term “Anthropocene,” which was coined to argue that humans’ impacts on the planet, its surface, and its climate are such that we have entered a new geological age in which humans, rather than natural earth systems, will be responsible for shaping Earth.

Many people, from different vantage points, have critiqued the term “Anthropocene.” Some note that by placing “blame” for anthropogenic climate change and other damage to the planet and its ecosystems at the feet of “humanity” writ large, the term obscures how not all people—either those living today, or those who have lived across vast spans of time—have been equally culpable. Particular lifeways associated with particular models of politics and economics, and particular forms of consumption and energy use, are most responsible. Some have suggested the term “Capitalocene,” to pin the blame on an economic and political system that has encouraged systematic exploitation of people and planet alike. Others suggest “Thermocene,” to highlight the significance of different forms of energy use as determining our current state. In other words, counter-terms abound, and the idea behind them is less to dethrone the “Anthropocene,” than to argue that precision in understanding the origins of our planetary crisis will lead to precision in responding.

“Pyrocene,” in Pyne’s own words, “proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire” (3-4). Pyne documents how changing human ideas about fire and its usefulness, and a changing sense of its compatibility with human-dominated landscapes, has ruptured our relationship with this source of life and destruction on our planet. “In unprecedented ways,” Pyne writes, “the Earth [now] had too much bad fire, too little good fire, and too much combustion overall” (5). Pyne’s book is short, elegantly written, and thought-provoking. I won’t write too much about it here, other than to suggest that you read it.

But I will write a little bit—self-indulgently—about some of the ways it made me think back to the way in which fire loomed over my life as I grew up in rural northern California. As Pyne notes, fire is nothing new. What is new, is the frequency and ferocity of fire. The corner of California where I grew up has long been a fire-scape. However, according to Pyne the state’s “historical pattern had been one of a big fire or fire bust followed by a quiet period of perhaps 5 to a dozen years.” “Conflagrations were not unusual; serial fire sieges were,” and this is precisely what has unfolded the last several years in the state (113-114). This was a result of “ a perturbed climate…the legacy of land use that had scrubbed away small fires and left only big ones…a disbelief that urban fires could move from the exurban fringe to (or over) the urban core, and…a misplaced confidence that more engines and air tankers could hold the line” (114).

When I was a kid, fire had a season. And on the hot, dry summer winds that wafted through pine crowns, came a little bit of anxiety. I remember this always being worse if there was a summer lightning storm. There were different ways of knowing if a fire had started in the county. Sometimes a neighbor would call, as a part of an informal kind of phone tree, to pass on word that they had got from someone they knew. Sometimes it would come over the radio—we had no television. Sometimes it was the drone of a helicopter, surveying the forest from above. And sometimes it was the smell of smoke.

These are things I didn’t think about much at the time, but the role olfactory and auditory senses is interesting to consider. I remember my father explaining the difference between the sound of the spotter helicopters and the occasional police chopper or air ambulance that would roar overhead. For big swathes of the year, smoke was nothing to remark on. We had longer, colder winters then, and wetter springs that pushed deeper into the year. Most people where I grew up had wood stoves, and so depending on the wind, as isolated as we were, smoke drifting across crisp winter air was normal. So too was smoke in a wet autumn or spring; fire safety meant raking and burning leaves and brush, and ranches or agencies would run controlled burns. We had to check whether it was a “burn day” before starting a fire.

I had a bad stutter when I was younger, and positively loathed talking on the phone. But calling the “Burn day” number for my dad was safe, because it was automated. Our landline—a rotary phone—sat inside a little cupboard by the front door, and the number was pinned on a piece of paper to the inside of the door. There was no need to get anxious about forcing out a tortured “h-h-hello”; I just dialed the number and got the ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ from a soothingly disembodied voice. [I’m not sure my dad actually need this number written down; he drove the school bus for the elementary school, and this left him in charge of determining “snow days,” a duty he was never willing to abuse, much to my dismay. On snow days, he was responsible for calling all of the families in the district to tell them school was out of session, and he could just about dial all of those numbers from memory as they mapped along his bus route.]

But in summer, smoke was a smell out of place, and it meant instant tension and alert. One of my parents would head to the phone to call a neighbor who might know more, the other would turn on the radio. The worst was if smoke came drifting through screen windows in the night. Then I would squint out the window up the ridge in back of the house, always imagining that I could almost see the flicker of some threatening flame. I would run over scenarios in my mind about what to grab if we had to leave quickly, and imagined having to walk in the dark down the middle of the creek if we were cut off from the road. Navigating the creek—with its quiet pools, small waterfalls, and hidden boulders—in summer when it was relatively low was a favorite activity, and so I knew the places where in my imagination we could submerge ourselves to avoid flames. This sounds, I think, more traumatic than it actually was. I always went back to sleep, and I didn’t spend my days full of anxiety. Fire, and the threat it posed, was intermittent and forgettable then in a way it isn’t now.

My mom is a worrier, and I suspect she hid very well from us her fears on those days when the smoke was out of place, and when the spotter craft passed by, usually out of sight over the ridge. These days, with the fire “season” stretched to most of the year, she worries more, and more openly. If my parents—retired—travel during the summer, they often pack boxes of important things and leave them with family in the Bay Area.

Pynes notes some of the consequences of the brutal 2018 Paradise fire in California, and those that broke out around it. Eighty-five people died, 18,661 structures were destroyed. “Insurance claims,” he recounts, “strained particularly small companies. Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility whose grid had failed, faced claims for damages as high as $30 billion, and filed for bankruptcy protection while CEOs faced charges for criminal negligence. To avoid repeats, utilities began turning off power during red flag days; this affected millions of customers. Insurance companies raised rates punitively…The knock-on effects will continue for many years” (113).

My parents’ rates have gone up dramatically in the past years. The are assiduous about clearing around the house, and chunks of their property. But they are adjacent to massive properties owned by logging companies, over which they and their neighbors have no control. People poach, fish, hike, ride ATVs, shoot, cut wood, and grow weed in these big, often-untended zones, and hearing a dirt bike along these roads in the summer also creates anxiety, because a spark from the exhaust can start a fire.

The worst phone calls weren’t from neighbors with warnings about a fire of so-many acres having started in such-and-such a place. They were the automated calls ordering an evacuation. I remember two of these. For my parents these must have been terrifying. I remember worrying. But it was also a bit like a holiday. We went and stayed with an elderly family friend down in flatter, more open country. She had a VCR, which was a treat, and a thick carpet which made sleeping on the floor pretty comfortable. And huge oak trees, and a sprawling gravel driveway and lawn filled with last season’s acorns. And across the footbridge was a slough where I could never quite see the beavers.

Not everyone followed the evacuation orders. I remember us driving home to check on things in the midst of our evacuation and stopping at a defiant neighbor’s house. In the end, the fire didn’t make it terribly close, but the detailed accounts of some of the recent fires that have scoured northern California make clear the peril of staying in place. Not everyone had Helen Bowen’s house to retreat to, either. Some families came and stayed at the tiny rural school—that was closed for summer. My dad—janitor as well as bus driver—went and turned on the water, and moved around furniture to make space for people to camp out in the small cafeteria and classrooms.

The local fire hall was the center of the social scene in the community. The Christmas bazaar was held there—it was cold because the doors were kept open—and the volunteer team was a presence at Chili cookouts. The small library was located just behind the hall. The members were ordinary-looking enough, but in my mind they transformed themselves in fire season, donning their equipment and boarding their trucks.

I remember once, when vague news about a nearby fire spread faster than any concrete information, my dad and I drove up the mile-long dirt road and down the paved road to a turnout where a number of other people had gathered to share what they knew. We waved to the fire engines that rumbled by, not so different from the inhabitants of some ancient city who stood by the gates to bid godspeed to an army that marched out to confront an invading force. Some people had brought cold sodas and water, and jogged alongside the engines to hand them up to firefighters.

If the spotter planes meant anxiety, the sound of the bombers—as we called the air tankers—meant hope. This was the aerial equivalent of the cavalry arriving. Pyne, however reminds us, of the limits of these technological defenses. “California,” after all, “ had a fire protection infrastructure unrivaled in the world; it had the five largest fire departments in the country and a century of aggressive suppression experience. [But] by 2020 it could no longer pretend that a fire agency could stand between California’s firescape and a preferred way of life that chose to ignore fire” (114).

One of the points Pyne hits home is that fire suppression—the hallmark of fire management in Europe and North America for the past century and a half—is failing. Too few “good fires” creates ecological conditions ripe for too many “bad” ones, something captured by this short video created by the management team of Lassen Volcanic National Park in the wake of a brutal fire year. This speaks to the connections between historical knowledge and management. California before white settlement was not, after all, a virgin landscape, but one managed by Indigenous communities that wielded what Pyne calls the concept of a “firestick” with care (62-3).

I was on a skype call with my parents the other day. At the start of the call they mentioned that they had recently received news of a fire somewhere nearby. They weren’t sure where or how large, but they were relatively sanguine; there wasn’t much wind at least. Mid-skype call, their phone rang and they got the equivalent of an “all clear” from a neighbor. The fire was much more distant than they had first thought, and seemed to be contained. But the ‘season,’ such as we can talk about one any longer, has begun.